Can Turning Air into Gasoline Really Reverse Climate Change?

Pedro_P

A conceptual drawing of the carbon-capture system. This unit would be one of many that would capture 1 million tonnes of carbon per year.
Credit: Carbon Engineering

▼ Scientists say they've developed a new technological solution to the climate crisis: an affordable method for sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to turn it into gasoline. But how does this process even work? And is it really a magic-bullet solution to climate change?
According to the researchers, the new technique would cost between $94 and $232 per metric ton. As Robinson Meyer, who first reported the story over at The Atlantic, reported, that figure is between 16 and 39 percent of what researchers expected this technology would cost back in 2011. It's cheap enough, he wrote, that it would cost just $1 to $2.50 to remove from the atmosphere the carbon dioxide released by burning a gallon of gasoline in a car.
Carbon dioxideis a major greenhouse gas and a key driver of climate change (though not the only one). So the prospect of sucking CO2 right out has potential to help abate climate change. Even if that CO2 gets released again when the gasoline is burned, no new greenhouse gas gets pumped into the sky; the researchers pitch it as a kind of recycling for greenhouse gas emissions.
The researchers were a team from Harvard University and a new company set up for this project called Carbon Engineering. They wrote in their paper, published Thursday (June 8) in the journal Cell, that their innovation isn't the development of any brand-new system for carbon capture, or pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. Rather, they said they're figuring out how to build and power an industrial-scale plant affordably. Meyer gave his article on the paper, which went viral, an eye-catching headline: "Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air Into Gasoline."
The process
As the researchers described in the paper, turning atmospheric CO2 into fuel is basically a four-step process:
1.
Suck in a lot of air.
2.
Pull carbon dioxide out of the air and stick it into a liquid.
3.
Separate the carbon dioxide from the liquid again.
4.
Mix in some hydrogen to turn the whole mess into combustible fuels, like gasoline.
The actual process is pretty complicated, but it all comes down to those four steps. And a lot of that is basic chemistry. Mixing CO2 into a liquid, for example, is just a matter of exposing lots of air to a strong base, or something with a pHmuch greater than 7. In this case, the base is a solution made up of water, ionic hydroxide, carbon trioxide and potassium. CO2 is acidic, so it will separate from the air in order to mix itself into the basic liquid, the researchers wrote.
The most difficult part of the whole process, the researchers wrote, is sourcing the materials for the factory so that this chemical reaction can happen at a large scale.  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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metac

interesting article

wangwilly

This is such a great innovation!

temujin

Perfect

soothsayer

If this really fixes it, it is pathbreaking!

bigsam2

This is a mirage, sounds great on paper but the actual execution costs would mean its prohibitive

b_mayukh

NOW IF THE CO2 IS TAKEN OUT OF AIR, HOW WILL PLANTS PHOTOSYNTHESIZE????

arjuns1988

with present technology, the energy required for this whole process would far exceed the energy can be produced by the gasoline produced. Plus, adding hydrogen to carbon di oxide liquid is not a simple process. This looks like a made up story!

sks

A more viable & economic idea would be an 'Oxygen producing factory' which produces Oxygen.

bsk

interesting